Around primary school, I got two scars on my chin, on the same place, because I did not have the reflex to put my hands in front of me when falling on my face. Both times I fell face-first on a stone floor.

And I once fell over backwards and broke my arm, because I was laughing so hard.

As a teenager I also broke my nose in 38 pieces because of that lack of basic reflexes + causing a traffic accident due to being reckless and stupid.

Kids, don’t go over red lights, even if you think there is no car coming. Especially not when it is getting dark and you got headphones with music on.

Maybe eventually my kids will have IPv6 as the common sense default and will marvel at the ingenuity of their ancestors to keep using way too few addresses for way too many devices

What is it that you call capitalism is the question.

Market capitalism is a practical approach to solving a intractable optimization problem - allocating finite resources in the best way to get optimal results (whatever it may be, such as maximizing production of certain goods while minimizing waste and loss and minimizing “unfairness”, however it is defined).

The alternative to capitalism is planned economy. It could not work 100 years ago because technology was not even close to the advancement level to be able to optimize a whole economy, i.e. solve a highly complex set of equations with billions of variables.

Maybe today it would work out, technology-wise, but it is not clear in detail how a society completely without markets could work. Certainly not everything is feasible to be decided by some election or by decision of some committee. It would lead to what was seen in the soviet union - bad planning based on incomplete and unreliable data.

Markets solve this problem and the whole thing works.

The question is who controls the markets.

In capitalism = neoliberal dystopia actually the capitalists themselves all instead of competing try to transcend beyond competition by either becoming a monopolist or becoming the market itself (“platform”). The fascist US oligarchs are working towards this.

On the other hand, China has state capitalism - the government has a strong upper hand, but use capitalistic market mechanics (with the needed biases to ensure the market is working towards the goals of the state, not some wealthy class).

Now you can explain to me how I maybe use the terms all incorrectly, but what I’m saying is: what China is doing is working, what the Soviets tried to do did not.

If China was not authoritarian, but had elections, it would be democratic and capitalistic, so what wie also call social democracy. In contrast to socialism, which is supposed to be democratic and anti-capitalistic, i.e. planned economy, which never worked and probably still would not.

The problem is not capitalism as a mechanism of economy, it’s the distribution of power. Corruption and decay and abuse is possible in every coceivable economic system. The question is, who is the system working for.

Ideally the state works for the people, in the sense of a collective of respected individuals, and the economy works for the state. If that is given, details such as the exact structure and processes for decision making and resource allocation are irrelevant, as long as they are sustainable and ethical.

Social democracy as a concept would work if those doing it would have a spine and not be traitors of the working class.

But whatever is sold as social democracy these days (or actually the last 20 years at least), I absolutely agree is a scam.

At least in Germany, there is no left party that is both realistic (not trying to be pacifist when facing bullies, or promising unrealistic things making sure they will never get more than 15%) and also truly acting in the interest of the people, sadly. SPD is the German version of what you said, slightly softer neolibs in sheep’s clothing.

Bandcamp solves all problems - you buy the CD as before, but digitally, including lossless FLAC, like 90% goes to the artist or their small label instead of Sony or Universal or Spotify, you can download the album or stream it with the app. It’s good enough for me that I only store the files for backup and use the app for listening to most of my recent music purchases.

If there was such a demihuman bike god, I would ride my bicycle more often. I just don’t want to have to maintain it and waste time of my life again because some dumbass broke a beer bottle on the street.

Fair enough.

I held on to this possibility for similar reasons for years, but after some honest self reflection I cannot say there would be anyone from my past life who is still important and I have no other means to contact, my Facebook bubble from 10 years ago and more is long dead, i.e. similarly inactive.

Maybe giving people an email address, phone number or username somewhere else via Facebook message before leaving for good could also be a solution.

Be brave, do it. I just did it a few months ago. Just push the trigger and delete it. Let it go. They will of course keep the data, but at least not legally anymore.

I would never want to work at a place where I have to talk like this unironically. It’s ridiculous.

If you are competent, you show it directly. No need to hide behind bullshit buzzwords.

Well, at least that’s my reverse filter for companies.

My current team leader interviewed me in a band shirt and we deep dived into realistic brainstorming for how I would approach real problems and we instantly vibed.

I immediately knew that’s a good place.

That is just needlessly mean. Done that once to some rando, even worse. I dumped a rant on them. They deleted the post and their account. I felt bad. Don’t be like me.

In general I disagree, often you can’t read it it’s satire, trolling or someone being serious, there are weird people and also bots on the internet.

However this piece was pretty clear satire, if you read far enough (probably I would have stopped in the middle and downvoted this crap if it was not marked).

The “ChatGPT showed me a new sorting algorithm” part really does make it pretty obvious to anyone with dev background that this is not serious.

we do cross platform stuff and I’m 99% of the time working on Linux, now I have to do some .NET core C# coding, was frustrated first with the language support on Linux - until I tried Rider. If I’ll have to do more C# going forward I’ll consider asking my employer to buy me a Rider license. The alternative would probably be me booting to Windows for that project (which I absolutely hate doing and only rarely have to)

In the old days, a few motivated nerds could write a browser. Now all you can realistically do is take a browser engine and build some user interface around it. That what most “alternative browsers” do - tweaking or repackaging.

These days, a browser is like it’s own operating system with sandboxing, various Interfaces to periphery devices, hardware acceleration for GPU and all the bells and whistles taken for granted now.

I’d say that imagining it to be on a scale similar to working on the Linux Kernel is more right than wrong.

So we definitely very much want Firefox to survive, or it will be much worse than the Linux/Mac/Windows trilemma. Microsoft Edge is chromium under the hood too. Any many desktop “apps”.

I did that for 3 years. Funny how it seems to be a universal experience. Confirms to me how it’s pretty much the same, regardless of project, funding or scientific area.

For me it was a bit heartbreaking to see, because I loved the idea of writing software for research. But the reality was that academia simply does not have the right structures to support serious and sustainable software development and until that changes, it feels more like a thankless “bullshit job”.

You simply can’t run software development in such a opportunistic and chaotic way like scientists do their research and write papers.

Nice! That also needs some reasonably good management to see your skills and talents.

Can totally see why you might not like roles “above”. There’s always some point where you stop solving the kind of problems you find interesting and have more bullshit to fight than it would be worth.

Like my team lead wisely said, “never become a team lead”, and I’m absolutely not interested, seeing all the crap he has to out up with, manage and firefight (I’m happy he does it while I can stay pretty relaxed and keep doing all the fun stuff).

That sounds pretty cool, I could imagine myself doing that.

How did you get into such a role? Is it some kind of consultancy?

My last job was: PowerPoint presentation and poster designer, educator, communicator and mind reader.

Tried to be software developer in science, turns out that I had to spend much more time promoting whatever little coding I do to interested parties, and creating software based on guesses what they could need and what the right thing probably should be.

It was a mess, for many reasons.

Now I’m an actual software architect and engineer.

As a metaphor, somewhere between apprentice dark magician (when sprinkling in some fancy things not many others would be able to do), gardener (need to clean up a lot of weeds, tidy up and revitalize the decomposing codebase, trim some rotten code branches) and strategist (when conceptually working on the mid and long-term planning and high level goals).

For me it was more like:

Ages 11-16: unaware sad cringe

Ages 17-24: learning to hide it

Ages 25-27: reaching achievement mountain, followed by

Age 28: quarter life crisis valley and the realization

Ages 29-now: unlearning to hide it and actually feeling good

Life is a beautiful journey. Just need to look with the right eyes.

Congratulations, you made it big on Mastodon! Teach me your ways.

This is the way.